Tuesday, May 4, 2010

New Chrome Beta 5 Rocks the Clock

A couple of hours ago, Google announced a new version of their Google Chrome web browser.

It was released today released in the 'beta channel'.

For those that haven't yet discovered Chrome, it's available in 3 flavors ...stable, beta and also a developer version.

This time,it's a huge leap.

Just one day after severalmajortechblogs reported that Chrome has made more headway into taking market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer, this new release adds the benchmark 'Version 5' signifying a major upgrade.

It's mostly about speed and standards .... and for the first time, released simultaneously for Windows, Mac and Linux. Actually, it's a LOT about speed:

The graphs tell the story for V8 and SunSpider .... but there's more.

Perhaps, one very loud signal in this release is initial integration and autodates of Adobe's Flash Player, a format which last week Steve Jobs completely dismissed for use in the iPhone or iPad (again), this time followed by some similar comments from Microsoft.

(I suppose it's worth noting here that while supporting HTML5 and it's proposed codecs for video, Google has spend a lot of work with Adobe to make Flash files easier to index (IE: SEO), an ongoing project for quite some time).

It doesn't stop there. The new version (which is being used to write this post and so far looks great in both Windows 7 and XP3), includes bookmark sync, numerous HTML5 additions, GeoLocation APIs, web sockets, drag and drop capabilities and more.

You can find out more in the video below, visit the Google Chrome blog here ... or just go ahead and download it here. (Note: Windows 7 user may find they have to offload their current install of Chrome first).